Category: Books

Us women have come a long way since the 1950s. A Google search for “1950’s sexist ads” comes up with such gems as a ketchup advert for a product that, presumably, had an easier to open bottle. The slogan: “You mean a woman can open it?”

The good news is that, in the UK at least, the majority of people recognise that women can open ketchup bottles just as effectively as men can. In fact, I’ve been known to open a number of jars that my husband couldn’t budge. And no, he didn’t loosen them for me.

It is great that women can now choose to have a career outside the home if they so wish. However, society has not fully caught up with this change, and while we might be able to work, we are often expected to do so without falling behind on domestic and mothering tasks. If we can’t go to all of the school assemblies, many of us feel like we might be failing as mums.

And even if we do stay at home full time, modern life seems to pile on the demands. In the 1970s, you could just make your kids some hot dogs, give them a cup full of juice, then throw them outside to play unsupervised with a stick and a ball. Today, you’re expected to cook organic, nutritionally-balanced meals while ensuring they are engaging in developmentally-appropriate, stimulating, supervised (and safe) activities.

The general feeling (propagated by everyone being fabulous on social media) that we need to be good at everything and live up to a certain ideal of womanhood and motherhood is pervading our lives. The sheer force of expectation on modern mums is taking its toll on our mental health. This is the problem that new book, The Supermum Myth: Overcome anxiety, ditch guilt and embrace imperfection, hopes to put right. It states:

“In our society there is relentless pressure for women to be exceptional at everything: gold-star mother, excellent partner, dedicated career woman, committed friend … [but] Supermum simply does not exist … The internet is awash with mum blogs, hashtags and handles with the recurrent theme of Being a Bad Mum: ‘bad mum’, ‘terrible mother’, ‘guilty mother’, ‘the guilty mothers club’, ‘#badparent’, ‘#mumfail’, ‘parenting fail’, ‘notparentingtheshitoutoflife’. This is a reflection of our ongoing struggle as mums with not living up to our own, and society’s expectations of what we should be a mothers. Pre-empting others’ judgement by judging ourselves as failing.”

The book points out that it’s simply not realistic to expect to achieve perfection in every aspect of your life. And when you see that other mum on the school run, perfectly dressed and serenely calm, she is not perfect either. Nobody is achieving the over-achieving supermum goal and everybody is getting it downright wrong with parenting and life sometimes. You may sometimes feel like everyone is handling life better than you, but odds are they feel just the same.

The Supermum Myth asks us to embrace “good-enough motherhood”. One in which we might not wash our hair for a week, but our kids are happy and safe. One in which we don’t feel guilty for plopping them in front of the telly so we can get some work done. It asks us to stop beating ourselves up for our perceived shortcomings, and start acknowledging our successes.

Of course, changing the way you think about your life is easier said then done. That’s why this book gives you practical tools, using a range of established therapies, to help you identify your negative patterns of thought and then work towards changing your mindset. There are all sorts of exercises that you can dip into when it suits you, to help you reset your thinking about your relationships, your thinking, your career, and your whole self.

This book dropped into my lap at a time when I did feel like I was drowning in a pool of my own ambitions for myself. I do want to be the successful career woman, the wonderful wife and mother, and the social butterfly. It is okay to want these things … as long as we don’t accompany our goals with a whip to beat ourselves with when things don’t go as we hoped. This book reminds us to enjoy the lives we have right now, instead of looking always onwards to an elusive perfection. Buy it from Amazon.

There are probably thousands of books out there about pregnancy, not to mention the probably millions of blogs and websites dedicated to the topic. So much so, that upon becoming pregnant the first time round, you may be a bit perplexed as to what to read.

Not everybody wants to know all the nitty-gritty details about pregnancy and birth, and that’s just fine. Your health professionals will tell you all you really need to know. But, if you’re the sort of person who likes to know as much as possible as to what you’re in for, then you’re probably going to be looking for a pregnancy book.

When I was pregnant with my first, I bought books about baby care, because I was more worried about that than the pregnancy part. I googled when I had questions about my pregnancy and enjoyed the sites that compare the size of your baby to a fruit or vegetable each week.

But the problem with google searches is they can take you down a black hole of confusion and self-doubt. There are so many websites, and many of them contradict each other. If you are googling because you are worried about some aspect of your pregnancy, this can get kind of stressful. And it also doesn’t help when you come across forums with lots of people spouting completely random opinions. It’s difficult to sort out fake from fact, and it can really lead to you feeling more confused than you did before you started googling.

A book I was recently sent to review, Pregnancy: The Naked Truthby Anya Hayes & Hollie Smith, is the antidote to late-night pregnancy google confusion. It is an amazingly spot-on collection of all the answers to the most common pregnancy questions and worries, aimed specifically at modern British mums. It is much more down-to-earth, less generalising, less judgemental, and less old-fashioned than other pregnancy books I’ve come across.

Some of the topics it covers include:

What’s safe to eat/drink/do in pregnancy without any scaremongering or overly cautious advice.

Everything to expect in terms of pregnancy symptoms – what’s normal and when you should go to the doctor.

What to expect from different stages in pregnancy and antenatal appointments.

All about work and maternity leave.

Sex and pregnancy.

Getting ready for birth and baby, and what to expect on the big day.

The first few weeks with your newborn.

The best thing about this book is the light, humorous tone it’s written in. It isn’t embarrassed to tell you exactly how flatulent you are likely to be in pregnancy or how loudly you might swear when you’re in labour. It also incorporates first-hand comments from mums who’ve been through it all.

At no point is the book judgemental. It is always realistic (for example when discussing whether you can have the odd glass of wine in pregnancy), and it respects a mum’s ability to decide for herself, given the most up-to-date facts about the matter.

Having already been through pregnancy twice, there was nothing in this book that surprised me. But I learned all of it from stressy googling and (sometimes bitter) experience. This book will prepare you mentally so that some of those aspects of pregnancy no one ever talks about won’t come as too much of a shock.

If you want to know all the secrets of pregnancy that nobody necessarily talks about, read this book. If you like to be prepared for everything, read this book. This is definitely the book I wish I had read when I was a first-time mum-to-be.

I received the book for free for the purposes of writing an honest review.

I remember being pregnant with my first son and stocking up on parenting books. I was going to crack this parenting thing. I read up on all manner of baby and child care, and had plans in place to totally smash any parenting challenge I might possibly face.

I was such an idiot.

There wasn’t a book in the world that could have prepared me for the onslaught of new information, overwhelming responsibility and lack of sleep that came with my first son’s arrival. I was a quivering mess before he was even finished being born, and it got a lot worse before it got better.

I read books on parenting theories. I read books with pictures and diagrams on how to change a nappy or give your baby a bath. I read books on how to schedule every minute of my baby’s day (you know the ones). Seriously, it might make you feel good to read them, but you don’t need them. You will be too tired to care whether you’re doing the nappy right. You will learn by doing. All the diagrams in the world are not going to prepare you for reality.

But one book I wish I had read before I had my children was Mum Hacks by Tanith Carey. When I agreed to review this book, I thought I might find some new tricks of the trade for me to add to my repertoire. And I have found a few (examples to follow in a bit). But where this book really excels is in laying out a blueprint for the sorts of things you actually need to worry about as a mum.

How to cater for your kids’ needs in the kitchen while avoiding it looking like a bombsite.

How to entertain your kids without getting buried by a toy tsunami.

How to get ready in the morning without shouting like a banshee.

How to get your kids to do anything without shouting like a banshee.

How to vaguely enjoy a holiday with young children.

How to keep your house sort of clean with minimum effort.

How to keep yourself sane by looking after yourself.

Now, I have to be honest. Some of the tips, to me, felt sort of obvious. For example, buy a good bib and a massive wipeable plastic highchair. Yep, weaning is a messy business – it’s not a secret. But upon reflection, I realise that tips like that are only obvious to me because I’m on my second toddler now. I’ve figured out a lot of stuff already, and often only by trial and error or blind luck. It actually would have been cool to have known some of these tricks beforehand, instead of googling them at 3am while I fed the baby.

So that’s why I’m recommending that this book is best suited to someone new to the entire business of parenting. It offers that sense of control that I was desperately looking for when I was pregnant with my first. It would have helped me think about what things were practical to buy. It would have helped me organise things in my home while I still had time to organise them, making it easier for me to cope with my little whirlwinds when they arrived. It would have given me a clearer sense of what to prioritise in family life and what is less important.

However, there were a few gems in this book even for the seasoned mum. There’s a bunch of really quick ideas for lunchbox contents that I never would have thought about. I now know how to make pretty pinwheel wrap sandwich thingys (although I clearly still don’t know what to call them).

And every mum should know that you can cut up an apple and then hold it together with a rubber band to stop it getting brown! I also liked the quick makeup tips. I’d never even heard of primer, the use of which apparently makes your makeup stay on better and longer.

So if you’re already a seasoned parent, this book might not change your life. But it is a well-written, amusing read that might add a few more tricks to your repertoire. Even better, buy it as a gift for a first time mum-to-be, and save her a bit of early morning googling.

Mum Hacks: Time-saving tips to calm the chaos of family life by Tanith Carey is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions. I received a gratis copy of the book for review purposes.

When I announced on my personal Facebook page that I was starting a blog, my most immediately supportive friend was Andrew Jarvis. He was one of a close-knit group of friends I had in high school, from whom I’ve been parted geographically but never in terms of my affection for them. When we were kids, Andy (a nickname he used then but no longer) and I bonded through a love of music, dancing, silliness and not giving a damn what anybody thought of us. To me, Andy was honest and free and ready to barrel headlong into life.

Recently, I saw him again for the first time in 15 years. I have to admit I barely recognised the boy who’d been such a big part of my life. I saw this calm, careful, articulate man named Andrew. He was all grown up and a published poet.

A picture of me and Andrew when we saw each other recently, for the first time in 15 years.

When he asked me to review his new book on my new blog, I was very flattered. But I have to say I feel a bit overwhelmed with the responsibility. Despite having a PhD in English, I don’t see myself as much of a poetry critic. So I’m approaching this review as a normal person who might want to read a bit of poetry. Thus forward, in my review I will call the poet Jarvis, as if we never drove together to the bowling alley singing Michael Jackson songs at the top of our lungs.

Poetry is perhaps not as popular in modern times as it once was. Friends recommend books and movies to each other, but rarely say, ‘hey, I read this great poem the other day’. Which is a shame actually, because a good poem carefully constructed can say as much in one page as an entire novel. Don’t think you have the time and energy to read much? You have time to spend 2 minutes reading a poem. Jarvis’s latest book, Landslide, is a good place to start. It is full of these perfect micro-stories that whisk you away to another world, draw you in and then spit you out with a changed perspective.

I feel like, knowing the author, I should have an insight into his poems and what they’re all about. But I don’t. In any case it doesn’t matter – my English degree whispers to me that the author is dead. So these are the themes that I see in this collection:

The brutality of nature and the brutality of man upon the natural world.

The inevitable decay of all earthly things, including those things that we love the most.

The way in which we love to erase the old with the new, but that memories are not so easily consigned to oblivion.

It sounds a little depressing, but actually it is uplifting . There is beauty in the recognition that these things come to pass and yet we all carry on. But most of all, the beauty is in the words themselves, conjuring images that carry you away from your sofa to a place where “sea lions adore / the abandoned, the thawed / freezers of heads and tails / as if they found Eden”.

Jarvis’s turn of phrase is so evocative and succinct, it’s like encountering each single drop of dew on a spider’s web as captured in a photographer’s lens. Here are a few excerpts from my favourite poems in this collection.

From “The Boxes”

She refilled the candy
when the grandchildren came,
peppermint mints and kisses
made of milk chocolate.

And we always found it,
in her special hiding place,
just below the pictures
and her little children things.

From “Rail Man”

The ballast, anchor, and roadbed,
the torn unfastened fastenings,
they severed his whole to his parts.

From “Old Growth”

Grandfather grew forests for us,
pierced the clouds and summoned their falls,
feeding the roots of his children.

From “Memory Bird”

And like an architect drafting the air,
she wants to remodel her memories,
piece together the wings, and fly back home.

Landslide is available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. If you are truly awesome, you could also try ordering it from your local bookshop, old-school style, for my old school friend.

I am a complete bookworm (in my “spare time” I work in publishing), and my favourite part of the day is reading to my children and definitely not when I drink wine after bedtime. However, there are so many children’s books out there that it’s hard to know which to buy, or even to decide which to grab at the library. So I decided to start sharing short reviews of all the library books we check out, in case you, dear reader, may find it useful. And also because I just want to.

This crop is what I’m reading to my 4-year-old now. Other times I might include the ones I read to the 1-year-old, but tonight I can’t because the books are in his room and I will NOT risk waking him up.

I was really excited when we checked this out as I’m a big fan of David Walliams. I’d heard good things about his longer books for older children but I wasn’t sure if he did any for younger children. We came across this one entirely by accident. The story stars an unrealistically polite little boy who receives an unwanted “slightly annoying elephant” as a houseguest. I think the elephant is more “extremely rude” than “slightly annoying”. It’s sort of a modern elephant version of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. But unlike the girl in the Tiger book, this poor boy is just home alone, wondering when his mother will return from the shops.

The verdict: Besides the fact that someone is probably going to call social services on the boy’s mum, it’s a pretty funny book. The “punchline” at the end of the book – which I won’t give away so that you have something to live for – doesn’t really hit the mark for me, but my son seemed to enjoy it.

I have to admit to being a fan of Topsy and Tim books. They keep it simple but it’s not all flowers and rainbows. And they address matter of fact things in a matter of fact way. I rather love the classic Topsy and Tim have Itchy Headswhich taught me things I never knew about head lice. This one teaches the reader about what to expect on a sports day, with the usual moral about how it’s the taking part, not the winning, that’s important.

The verdict: I recommend it. Especially if your child is feeling apprehensive about a forthcoming sports day, as it will show them what to expect.

I really rather like this one. It almost seems like it’s more for the parents than for the kids. Edwardo does standard things that children do which are somewhat naughty, and various people tell him he’s absolutely horrible for doing them. Under the lens of such criticism, he gets more and more horrible. But when people start giving him more positive feedback, he starts to clean up his act. It’s a reminder about how if you put someone down enough, they will start to believe it, but if you build them up, they will try to live up to the praise.

The verdict: My son seemed sort of confused by this book, like he didn’t really understand the point. I would say that’s because it seems to be more for the parents. But worth getting for your own sake.

This is officially a family favourite now as we’ve checked it out several times. It tells the story of a boy who tries to tell his parents that a monster is about to eat him. The monster eventually does eat him and then takes Bernard’s place in the house, eating his dinner and sleeping in his bed, but his parents never notice.

The verdict: My son thinks this story is hilarious, probably because he relates to it (Not Now, Honey, Mummy has a new Twitter follower). And I like it because it reminds me not to ignore my kids. Also, it’s nice and short so I can get back to my smartphone. Definitely recommended.

I have to admit that I had previously thought Quentin Blake was only an illustrator and not a children’s writer in his own right. It appears that he’s actually written quite a few books of his own. This story is about a brother and sister who long for adventure and eventually get it when they are blown out to sea whilst holding onto a large umbrella, Mary Poppins-style. They end up chillin’ on a desert island until some sailors rescue them and bring them home. I personally have trouble suspending my disbelief that the umbrella landed them on a tiny island instead of the middle of the ocean.

The verdict: My son has asked to read this several times over so he must like it. If I’m honest, I find the story to be a bit dull. But, of course, the illustrations are fantastic.

This is a long one (32pp split into 4 chapters) so it’s not for those short of attention span (or patience). My son loves Thomas and seems to enjoy the story, and the writing isn’t as cringeworthy as most children’s books that are based on a film. From what I remember when I paid attention (rather than daydreaming about something else while reading on autopilot), it’s about Thomas finding some lost treasure. Then some other dude tries to steal it but it all turns out all right in the end. And Thomas crashes a lot. I bet he’s still on time more often than Southern Trains though.

The verdict: I’d say the book is not a bad choice if your little one is a big Thomas fan, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to pick it up.